LOL, kids.

[conuly]

Eva had put off the writing part of her homework a really long time, and finally it bumped up against bedtime and it had to be done. The assignment was to write five or more sentences about a happy or sad memory, and she was raging around the house, screaming that she HAD no happy memories NOR any sad memories, they were all just MIDDLE memories and that wasn't RIGHT and NO Mommy couldn't just write her a note she HAD to do it and she could NOT go to bed until she DID it.

Finally, in a brief lull, I was able to get her over to me and I laid it down for her.

"Look, here's what we do. I will dictate five sentences to you. You will write them down. We will simply lie, and your teacher will neither know nor care. All right?"

So we began. I got as far as "This is a story about the time I...." with the intention of letting her pick the scenario when she changed it to "Once I went ice skating" and then proceeded to do the entire assignment herself, sentence by sentence, only stopping to ask for the occasional spelling help. After she was done, having dictated each sentence before she wrote it, she stopped and said "You know, it's a lot easier when I talk about it first!"

Yes, and it's not like the rest of us tried to tell her that at any point during her tirade either!

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh, do I ever relate to her difficulty there. For ordinary children, there may be little or no difficulty about picking out discrete memories to categorize as either 'happy' or 'sad', and little or no concern about whether or not it's RIGHT, but to the highly sensitive and introspective child, things are not so cut-and-dried. Where does one even start, to categorize one's own personal memories according to someone else's either-or pigeonholes? Suppose the memories of the times you were happiest are so bittersweet in retrospect that thinking of them makes you cry?

"We will simply lie, and your teacher will neither know nor care."

YES. *wild applause* Very likely it was that statement that freed her from the hopeless downward spiral of trying to sort out all her feelings about all her memories into the designated categories, and made her realize that all that was called for was five little sentences, that didn't have to be Ultimately True.

Trying to tell anybody anything when they're in the midst of a tirade is generally futile. But - without knowing the child at all - I surmise that it wasn't really "talking about it" that made the big difference at all, but rather the 'permission' to not tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth about her feelings regarding her memories. Consider what an impossible task that would be for even the most introspective and philosophical adults - if that's what she thought was being required of her, no wonder she freaked out.

[conuly]

Her Friday homework is more of the same. I successfully dodged Friday homework all last year, with nary a word said by her teacher, but Jenn is still out of work and has caught on to the scheme. Of course, she's also finally caught on to how frustrating homework time can be, so after a few weeks of this maybe she will quietly stop doing it too. She already threw up her hands and said she refuses to make the kids do more than a reasonable amount of work, as suggested by the NEA. (Their times aren't really so reasonable if you ask me, but when you've got one kid insisting she can't write her assignment and the other staring off into space and both of them crying at bedtime, any limitation is better than none.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

One very important lesson for children to learn about school is that many of the lessons in school are not very important. The real question is whether what they're told to do is helping them learn something, demonstrating that they have learned it so they can be graded, or just wasting their time. Almost all homework falls into the third category, so there is nothing wrong with slamming it out in the most expedient fashion, or better still, not doing it at all.

I hold with no homework in grade school; no more than an hour per week-night in middle school, and no more than two hours per week-night in high school - which would mean teachers could only assign it once a week per class. Of course there could be extra-credit assignments for those wanting to pull their grades up, but they'd be optional and voluntary, and hopefully tailored to the individual pupil's needs, at least to some extent.

If your girlies are both crying at bedtime over homework, what are they learning from it? How's it affect their health, their attitudes about learning and about themselves, and the serenity of their family relationships? Are they in fact learning anything positive from this forcible intrusion of schoolwork into their supposedly-free time, let alone anything valuable enough to warrant putting them under that kind of stress? How would they be spending their time if they never had any homework?

[conuly]

Well, let's be utterly fair. What the girls had done was dawdle and delay since leaving school. I think they have too much homework, and I think too much of it is busywork (especially now, when so much of it is review), but it shouldn't take them that long if they'd just sit and do it.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't doubt it, because that's usually the way of it with Homework Wars: it shouldn't take that long, but it does take that long. But suppose they didn't resist, and instead did all their assignments promptly? However long it took, it would still be a waste of their time if they weren't learning anything from it.

The public schools are supposed to provide an equal education to all students. Homework subverts that by making success in school dependent on help at home. Consider: if all schoolwork was done during school hours, the grade curves of a lot of classes might look quite different.

[conuly]

Well, I can't argue with you there. I've long since thought that homework is useless in the lower grades, and often useless later (and we really are kidding ourselves if we think high school teachers in the average, overcrowded school are REALLY getting paid enough to check all those assignments!) but when you're in school you have to put up with at least some of it.